Talking Climate · The Wilkes Center for Climate Science and Policy

23: Monitoring Forests as they Change

·32 min·2 clips

Different biomass datasets over the same area can differ by almost a factor of two.

1. Talking Climate focuses on John Wang’s work on monitoring forests as they change, using remote sensing and high-resolution laser data. 2. Ross Chambliss hosts the episode, and John Wang appears as an assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences and leader of the Dynamic Carbon and Ecosystems Lab. 3. The episode asks how Wang’s team can turn aircraft, satellite, and machine-learning data into better carbon benchmarks for forests. 4. Wang says the DICE Lab maps where ecosystems change in response to climate change and human activity, including wildfires, increased CO2, and land use. 5. He points to the far north in Canada and Alaska, where climate change is occurring rapidly and forests may be shifting through warming, wildfire, and growth changes. 6. Wang describes above-ground biomass as the carbon stored in living biomass, with large trees holding large amounts of carbon. 7. He says current biomass maps are often coarse or weak on time series, which limits how well researchers can track change. 8. The grant with Google aims to produce biomass maps at the individual-tree level using airborne laser scanning. 9. Wang explains that airplanes can shoot lasers at the ground and estimate tree height and carbon with simple models and assumptions. 10. He says the same high-resolution maps can be rescaled to 30-meter, 100-meter, or one-kilometer products for comparison with satellite datasets. 11. Wang says benchmarking means creating a trusted standard that other researchers can use to test whether their biomass maps are accurate. 12. He notes that many existing biomass datasets differ by almost a factor of two over the same area, which makes validation difficult. 13. He says the U.S. Forest Service’s ground plots are hard to access because coordinates are protected by privacy laws and land agreements. 14. Wang describes three lidar scales: satellite laser scanning, terrestrial laser scanning on tripods, and airborne laser scanning from a small plane. 15. He says the project will use NEON, the National Ecological Observatory Network, with standardized field sites across roughly 40 U.S. locations. 16. He also says the team will use airborne lidar from the Canadian Forest Service and earlier NASA terrestrial ecology work in Canada and Alaska. 17. The conversation turns to California, where Wang’s Environmental Research Letters paper compares forest exposure and fire severity with tree-cover loss after wildfire. 18. Wang describes the paper as building on work from UC Irvine and says it examines the 2020 and 2021 fire years, when California burned more area than before. 19. The interview is conversational and technical, with Ross Chambliss asking short follow-up questions and Wang answering in detailed, lab-oriented explanations. 20. Listeners interested in remote sensing, forest carbon, or climate policy will get the most from it, while listeners seeking a light casual chat may skip it.

As heard by us

A grounded climate interview about measuring forest change and tracking ecosystem change over time.

Talking Climate follows how forests are measured as they shift under wildfire, timber harvesting, urbanization, and drought. The discussion with John Wang is at its best when it lays out how the DICE Lab uses remote sensing, airborne laser scanning, and other computational…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want to hear how forests are measured with airborne laser scanning before they change beyond recognition.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Talking Climate